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FOREWORD 


T may seem strange, but it is true, that the 


weightiest question before every com- 
munity is: ‘‘How shall the public revenue be 
secured ?”’ 

Most people consider it a matter of minor 
importance how you get the money for gov- 
ernmental activities so long as you get it. This 
is a mistake for which every state in the world 
is to-day paying a heavy though generally un- 
suspected price. A community can take its 
own money to pay its own bills and _ thereby 
promote individual and collective prosperity; 
or it can take away from the earnings and 
savings of individual citizens and thereby hin- 
der all prosperity except that of speculating 
in land titles. This sounds complicated; and 
many speakers on the subject make it so. In 
reality it is plain and simple and can be so 


stated. 


I do not think I have read anything which 
makes clearer the fundamental facts or that 


illustrates them more practically than does the 
following by Mr. James R. Brown, at this 


writing, President of the Manhattan Single 


- Tax Club, and always an apostle of righteous- 


“ness in the underlying and most important 


* 


» function of all government. 


This booklet is made up from one of Mr. 


Brown’s Plain Talks on Taxes which he 
has been giving in many cities and Digs 
throughout the country. It does not pretend | 
to be a polished essay and of course is not 
exhaustive. If you are holding vacant land 
- for a rise, or maintaining an obsolete building 
on a valuable site, you may not like it; if you 
are the average citizen working every day to 
make both ends meet, you probably will. In 
any case, you can, I think, learn from it, if 
you don’t know already, something about the 
difference made to you by the way your com- 
munity raises its public money. 


CHARLES T. ROOT. 





i; 


A PLAIN TALK 
ON TAXATION 


_ By 
JAMES R. BROWN 


President, Manhattan Single Tax Club 


T breaks my heart, when leaving a single 
I tax meeting, to hear somebody coming out 
say: ‘‘Well! I listened to those speeches, 
but I don’t know any more about the single 
tax now than when I went in’’; and I am 
aware that people of ordinary good sense 
sometimes have that experience. Now, the 
single tax is not hard to understand, and I am 
sure I can prove that to you if you will listen 
to me for fifteen minutes. 


EXACTING MONEY’S WORTH 


When we buy anything it is our instinct and 
our right to appraise it beforehand and assure 
ourselves, as far as our judgment allows, that 
we are paying for just what we get, and get- 
ting just what we pay for. When we buy a 
barrel of flour, a suit of clothes, a building, a 
watch or a day’s labor, we first satisfy our- 
selves, by shopping around or otherwise, that 
we are getting and giving value received. But 
in our ordinary life there is one glaring ex- 
ception to this rule. We all have to buy social 
service, community service: that is, what our 
local and state authorities do for us. We have 
to buy this service the same as we have to 
buy any other necessity of life, but we are 
not allowed to appraise it, to say how much 
of it we are getting, what it is worth to us, 
or how much we shall pay for it. Taxation 

3 


is simply collecting pay for community serv- 
ice, and under present systems it is a hit-or- 
miss proceeding, falling like the rain indeed, 
upon the just and upon the unjust, but, un- | 
like the rain, usually hitting the unjust very 
lightly, and the just very hard. 


A TERRIBLE POWER 


I wonder how many of us appreciate the 
scope of this great power, the taxing power of 
the state; how far-reaching in its influence 
and how evil in its results if wrongly used. 
It is the supreme power of the whole people. 
It is the one thing above all others that de- 
termines the nature of our individual life and 
existence, whether it shall be a mean and nar- 
row one, or a full and a beautiful one. More 
than anything else in life it marks for us 
either the path of poverty or the path of pros- 
perity. It is the power that turns day into 
night or night into day; it is the command 
that can lay waste the garden and make it 
look like a desert, or that can make the desert 
bloom and blossom like unto a garden. Jt has 
the power to destroy; it has the power to create. 
It is the power that either shuts the door of 
opportunity upon labor and upon capital, or 
that opens the door of opportunity to labor and 
to capital. 

To-day, we have a strange situation. The 
struggle for the individual life is very, very 
keen. Notwithstanding our ability to produce 
those things with which we satisfy desire, the 
great mass of people have a life and death 
struggle just to barely live; the working man 
_ to keep himself alive; the business man to keep 
his head above water; the capitalist to keep 
his capital intact. On the other hand, while 
the individual has this trouble our social or- 

4 


ta 


~ 
a 


ganisms also have a terrible struggle to main- 
tain their existence and to carry on their social 


activities. Everywhere you go, every city or 


town you come to has a tax problem. I just 
came from Providence this morning. They are 
struggling there with the problem of how to 
raise revenue, and the state is also struggling 
with the problem of how to get revenue 
enough for Rhode Island. Wherever you go, 
every town, every hamlet, every big city, is 
weary struggling with this tax problem. What 
is the answer? What is the way out? It is not 
the issuing of bonds; it is not the putting of 
new burdens upon the people in some other 
direction; it is not loading future generations 
worse than we have done. it is the taking for 
present use the present values socially created 
of which there is, always and everywhere, a 


plenty. — 
WHAT TAXATION IS 


Now, taxation is essentially payment for 
social services. Society does something for 
the individual members of society and society 
must be paid for the service. What should be 
the basis of payment? Our present method 
couldn’t be worse. Go into an asylum and get 
from it a man over whose mind reason has 
lost sway, and set him down with a pen and 
paper and say to him, “Friend, write us a 
system of raising public revenue,’’ and the 
worst that he could do couldn’t possibly be 
with a pile of unpaid debts; Our tax books 
from beginning to end are but a collection of 
guesses. Our tax rolls are stained with grand 
and petty larceny from top to bottom. We 
take private property for public use and give 
public value for private enjoyment. The man 
who makes two blades of grass grow where 
one grew before, we punish him, and the man 

5 


who prevents any grass at all from growing, 
we reward him. Could we do worse? 

In every phase of life, you know, comedy 
and tragedy go hand in hand; the tear fol- | 
lows the laugh and the laugh the tear and 
even our tax system is no exception, for it can 
give you many a hearty laugh as well as many 
a tear. A fellow gets drunk and paints the 
town red; we fine him; another fellow stays 
sober and paints his house white and we fine 
him. One fellow builds a chicken-coop—we 
fine him every year the chicken coop is in 
existence, while the fellow who robs the 
chicken coop, we fine only once. The man 
who uses opportunity, we punish; the man 
who does not use it we liberally reward. 


IT’S THE WAY THAT COUNTS 


Let me say again that the way you raise 
your public revenue is the all-important thing, 
not the amount you raise. This is because a 
tax upon land values operates exactly opposite 
to a tax on labor values. A man got up ina 
meeting of mine and said: ‘Oh, what differ- 
ence does it make? We have got so much 
money to raise, let us raise it any way we 
can get it, the quicker the better.’’ Says I: 
“(Do you think so?’’ He said: ‘Certainly.’ 
I said: ‘‘Suppose you had a hundred pounds 
to carry, would it make any difference how 
you carried it?’’ He answered: ‘Not at all.’”’ 
“All right,’’ I said, ‘“‘we will tie it to your left 
leg instead of putting it on your right shoul- 
der.’’ Of course there was no answer. Then 
I said: “If a ship had a cask to take to Eu- 
rope, where could it best carry it, down in the 
hold, close to the keelson, or throw it over- 
board at the end of a line and drag it across?” 
This is a rough illustration of the importance 

6 


of how we raise our public revenue. We can 
raise it and shut the door of opportunity to 
labor and to capital, increase the cost of living 
to every human being, and bind unjust burdens 
grievous to be borne upon the back of labor 
and capital—or we can raise it in such a way 
that by the very raising of ii we relieve labor 
and capital and force open the door of natural 
opportunity to labor and to capital. Let me 
explain this further for here is the whole 
point and nub of the single tax. 


HOW IT WORKS 


A tax that falls upon anything produced by 
labor restricts the production of that thing 
and increases the cost of living; and (note 
this), the failure to tax land values has ex- 
actly the same effect; it restricts production;- 
it raises the cost of living; it lowers wages; 
it increases the price of land. Untax entirely 
the land of this city to-night and land prices 
would be half again as high before morning. 
Labor and capital would have a burden so 
enormously increased that they would stag- 
ger and fall under the load. Outside of the , 
absurdity, evil and dishonesty of it, how per- 
fectly ridiculous it is to tax the things that 
we want. Suppose we don’t want dogs, what 
shall we do with them? Oh, just tax them 
and they’ll go. If the tax were high enough 
every ki-yi in town would disappear. But 
we forget that it has the same effect upon the 
things that we need, the things that enter into 
our life, implements, food, raiment and shel- 
ter. Tax them and you make them dearer 
and you make them scarcer. 

But now see the exactly opposite effect of 
taxing land values. While taxing labor prod- 
ucts makes them scarcer and dearer, taxing 

7 


land values makes land more plentiful and 
cheaper. I don’t mean that you can increase 
the surface of the earth by taxation, but land 
held out of use might as well be on Mars for | 
any good it does us; so as taxing land values 
makes more land accessible as well as making 
it all lower in cost, I am correct in saying that 
it makes land more plentiful and cheaper. 
Don’t lose sight of this statement for a mo- 
ment. It is the heart and soul of the single 


ax: 
GROSS INJUSTICE 


Now that I have pointed out some of the 
public benefits of taxing land values, let us 
turn the subject round and look at the public 
injuries that result from noét taxing land val- 
ues. If you do not tax land values what hap- 
pens? You are just giving a premium that 
encourages men to hold out of use large areas 
of valuable land. In New York, for instance, 
we are very foolish. We raise at least a hun- 
dred millions a year in this town by taxes upon 
labor values, every cent of which is added to 
the cost of living, with a profit tacked on as 
well. Now, that is wicked, because that is 
needlessly taking private property for public 
use, and there is no warrant in ethics for any 
such action. Worse yet, we give to a com- 
paratively few individuals our economic rent 
or land value, a value socially created, to the 
estimated extent of about three hundred mil- 
lions a year, as a reward for what? For doing 
something? No. For doing nothing, making 
land scarce and dear artificially, and thus shut- 
ting the door of opportunity upon labor and 
upon capital. Find me valuable land idle, and 
I will find you idle men and idle capital; they 
go hand in hand. Land value is the value of - 
an opportunity to produce things and to do 

8 


business. Now, when value of the oppor- 
tunity so far exceeds the value of the things 
we produce, as is the case in New York City, 
what can you have for the individual life of the 
majority but stress and strain and poverty, 
and what can you have for the social life but 
debts and burdens and bankruptcy? Our land 
valuation in New York, the assessed value of 
the land, the valuation left over after we have 
taken some taxes, is over five billion dollars, 
and the value of all the things upon that same 
land that have been produced in all these 
years only amounts to three billion. The price 
of the opportunity to produce has been raised 
by our boosting system, by our system of 
paying men to hold land idle. It has so far 
boosted land prices that they exceed by two 
billion dollars the value of the things pro- 
duced by labor and by capital. That is a seri- 
ous situation, but one which is by no means 
peculiar to New York. 

It is a cardinal principle of the Single Tax 
that land values are public property because 
they are not made by labor or capital, but are 
the sole product of the presence and expendi- 
ture of the community. Our present system 
of taxation and land handling is a flat denial 
of this principle. 


SELLING GOOD GOVERNMENT 


A man comes to me, for instance, and asks: 
“What do you want for that vacant lot?” I 
say to him: ‘‘Five thousand dollars.’”’ He says: 
“What, five thousand dollars? Great Heavens, 
that is an awful price. Why, five years ago 
you only paid five hundred for it.’”’ I say: 
“‘That’s a fact, but let me tell you a few things. 
You know when I bought that lot, this street 
wasn’t even graded; it was not sewered; it was 

9 


not lighted; it was not policed. This was a 
miserable town to live in then. There were 
very few churches; there was no free delivery 
of mail, the poorest kind of stores; there 
wasn’t a good theatre in the place; there was 
no fire department—Oh, pshaw! Why, it was 
the meanest kind of a hole that a white man 
could live in, and I paid all that lot was then 
worth, five hundred dollars; but, now, see 
what has happened? Population has moved in. 
Not only are the streets graded and the town 
paved, sewered, lighted and policed, but we 
have here a splendid fire department, a sani- 
tary department, the best of common schools, 
a high school, a good free library, free delivery 
of mail, best of stores you can find anywhere— 
no human desire but what can be satisfied 
right here—Oh, this is some town; this town is 
worth living in now, and for that reason this 
little bare lot is worth five thousand dollars.” 

Now, what am I selling this man? Land? 
Not at all. I could sell him a piece just as 
pretty and larger back in the bush for ten dol- 
lars. I am not selling him land; I am selling 
that man five thousand dollars’ worth of good 
government, of social service; not service that 
I rendered, but that the community renders 
and pays for out of its taxes. 

How do I get at the price of five thousand 
dollars for this land? There are a dozen ways 
of figuring it, but this will answer for illus- 
tration. I sell him 


Paved and sewered and lighted streets. .$1000 
Police and fire department........... 1000 
Good and cheap transportation service. 1000 
Nearness of schools, churches and stores 1000 
Advantages of social life, amusements, 
etc.,which accompany large population 1000 


$5000 
10 


And when I have given my customer a title 
deed to these things which I had no hand in 
creating, and have taken his five thousand dol- 
lars and salted it away in a five per cent mort- 
gage, what then? Why, the unsophisticated 
victim will put up a house on that lot and 
under the guise of taxation will pay over again 
every year for the social service and advan- 
tages for which I had already collected from 
him in full and for ever; for so long as I can 
find a safe five per cent investment, this man 
will pay me and my heirs after me, $250 a 
year, and that is all the social services of that 
town are worth to him. 

While I was speaking at a meeting in Buf- 
falo a man got up to ask why he should be 
taxed on his lot to support the high school 
nearby. “I hain’t got a kid to send to it, and 
vacant lots don’t go to school,’’ he said. I en- 
couraged him by replying: ‘All right, friend, 
go ahead.” ‘‘Well,”’ he continued, ‘‘why should 
I be taxed for a fire department? You can’t 
burn up a piece of land, and that’s all I own. 
Why should I pay to support a police depart- 
ment? Burglars would have a hard time to 
get away with my lot.” ‘That’s true,” I ad- 
mitted. “But wait a moment. Suppose you 
took a man to-morrow morning to look at that 
lot with the idea of selling it to him. Would 
you tell him what you have just been insist- 
ing on to me? That a lot can’t burn and so no 
fire department is needed? Not much. You 
would show him how handy to the school 
house for his children the place was. You 
' would tell him that this was just the spot to 
put his house because the fire department 
was just around the corner and was so much 
on the job that if he lit a match they would 
be around in a jiffey and put it out; that you 

a 


had the best police department in the state, 
fine street lights and pavements, etc., and 
that all these advantages made the lot well 
worth the rather elevated price you had to 
ask him.”’ 

Now, this is only a fair instance of what is 
happening a thousand times a day in the 
cities and towns all over the country. Do you 
need any other or further proof that the value 
of land is the true, exact and automatic meas- 
ure of the value of social service? And if you 
see that, can you name any other equally just 
source of revenue to maintain this social serv- 
ice than the land value which the social service 
creates? Take land values for public revenue, 
and you distribute fairly the cost of govern- 
ment besides letting the citizen off with one 
payment instead of the two he makes now; 
once to the individual land owner and once to 
the taxgatherer. This is a matter that every- 
one is vitally concerned in, although too few 
voters realize it; like one man who told me 
“he wasn’t interested in the land question; 
he worked on a ferryboat and lived on the 
fifth floor!”’ 


THE TRUE VIEW POINT 


One of our main troubles has been that we 
haven’t caught on to the fact that taxes are 
simply payment for social services. Another, 
that we have no idea that it is possible to 
measure exactly the value of social service or 
to obtain from each individual his just and 
broper share of the cost of it. Still another 
trouble, and this a very serious one, is that 
our tax-laying authorities have almost wholly 
failed to realize the vital importance of the 
‘incidence of taxation’’—that is, on what part 
of the body politic taxation falls. The general 

12 


notion has been, ‘‘We need so much revenue; 
what difference does it make how we get it?” 
and with that go-as-you-please idea in mind, 
as we find we need revenue, we simply grab 
it wherever we think we can get it easiest. 
Under this system, from those who show evi- 
dence of doing business and helping to build 
up a community, we take what we want irre- 
spective of the social service rendered them. 


AN ABSURD METHOD 


The leading idea among taxation “‘experts’’ 
seems to be to collect from people according to 
their ability to pay without reference to the 
amount of social service they buy. How would 
we like to conduct our every day transactions 
on that principle? You pay for your groceries 
‘according to the value of the goods delivered 
and not according to your ability to pay. Just 
suppose that a man went into a store with an 
$800 sealskin overcoat on and stepped up to 
the counter and asked the girl for a spool of 
cotton, and the girl put it down on the counter, | 
and he asked: ‘“‘How much?” and she looked 
him over and said: ‘“Ten dollars, please ’? The 
man would say: ‘“‘Great heavens, I never paid 
more than five cents for it?’ The girl an- 
swers: ‘“‘Well, we have changed our way of 
doing business; we charge now according to 
the ability of the people to pay, not according 
to the value of what they get.’’ Now, that i; 
exactly what we do in our tax system. You 
build a $5000 house back in the swamp, and 
the assessor comes along and carges you 
just as much on that building as though it 
were in the heart of the town on a lot that 
receives the maximum of social service. 

So much for explanation. Now, let us get 
down to brass tacks and see how this is going 

13 


to practically affect you, me and the other 
fellow. Let me give you a little conversation 
between myself and a man at a meeting in a 
church at which I recently spoke. He asked 
this very question:—‘‘How is this going to 
affect me?’’ I answered his question with 
another. ‘‘Do you own around here?” “I own 
a house and lot,” he said. ‘‘How big is the 
lot?” I asked. ‘“Twenty by one-hundred feet, 
and it cost me $700.”’ ‘‘What is your house 
itself worth?”’ He said: ‘'$3,500.” ‘You paid 
then about $4,200 all together, and you pay,” 
I hesitated, ‘‘about $80 a year taxes?”’ ‘“‘That’s 
about right,’’ he answered. ‘‘What is next 
door to you?” ‘A vacant lot.” “What is that 
worth?’ I asked. ‘‘$700.” ‘‘Then it’s not 
worth any more or less than yours,’”’ I said. 
“No,” he replied, “it’s the same street.” 
“What is on the other side of your house?”’ 
‘‘Another vacant lot,’ he said. ‘‘What do 
those fellows pay?” ‘$12 each,” he replied. 
“Let’s see, then; you pay $80 and they pay 
$12 apiece, so the town gets $104 out of the 
three of you?” ‘“That’s right,” he said. 
‘“‘Well,’’ I continued, ‘“‘you did a respectable 
thing in putting a house up, and they are just 
holding theirs vacant.’ ‘‘That’s the size of 
it.’ ‘Now, then,’’ I concluded, “if all 
three of you paid 5 per cent tax on the valua- 
ion of your land, you would each pay $35, and 
fiom. all three there would be collected $105, or 
$1 more than under the present arrangement.” 
The man thought a minute and then he asked: 
“Is that single tax?’ ‘Yes,’ I replied. 
‘Well, then,” said he, ‘‘I am a single taxer.” 


JUST COMMON SENSE 


Is there anything unfair about that? These 
other men are getting exactly the same serv- 


14 - 


ice from the community—the proof of that is 
the price of the land they have possession of. 
That they do not use it is entirely wide of the 
mark. If you went to a hotel and got the best 
room, on a corner, where you could rubber up 
both streets, and worth $5 a day, and then 
took the key and stayed away a week, and at 
the end of the week the hotel man presented 
you with a bill for $35, would you hand the 
bill back and say, ‘‘I didn’t use the room’’? 
If you were to try on that plea he might say 
some things to you that are unprintable, but 
he would say to you in effect: ‘You kept 
somebody else from using it, you had the op- 
portunity to use it, I supplied you with the 
utility, and this hotel doesn’t care whether you 
use it or not—now come across and pay your 
bill.’ If you were going to the theatre and 
bought two seats, and did not use one of the 
tickets and went the next day to the box-office 
and said that you didn’t use the ticket, would 
you get your money back? You would not! 
We don’t think of doing such things in our 
business, we do business on the single tax plan. 
Take an office building, for instance. You go 
in and want to rent an office. Would they 
charge you in accordance with the business 
you are in? Not unless they are running an 
extraordinary risk in renting to you, unless 
you were running a gold brick game or some- 
thing of the kind, and they thought they could 
put something over on you. If you were run- 
ning a legitimate business, they would say to 
you offices here are worth a dollar a square 
foot, and a dollar a square foot is what you 
would have to pay for it, whether you did a 
business of a million dollars a day or sat at 
your desk and wrote letters to your friends. 
That is the single tax—pay for what you get, 
15 


according to the right value of the thing you 
are getting. How do you pay for groceries, 
or hats or clothes? According to the value 
of the thing you get. But we have been in 
the dark in the past and struggling around 
like a blind mule in a bog, because we did not 
know how to charge for social service. That 
is the only trouble—we didn’t know how. To- 
day we know that the measure of the value 
of social service is land value, and land value 


only. 
THE ONE YARD STICK 


All improvements in a town add to land 
values and to the value of nothing else. If you 
took a badly paved street in your town, and 
paved it beautifully, and swept it twice a day 
and sprinkled it with rose-water, what would 
go up in value? The furniture in the homes 
on that street? Not one cent. The personal 
property in the stores on that street? Not one 
cent. The buildings on that street? Not one 
cent. The salaries of the men who lived on 
that street? Not a cent. What, then, would 
go up in value? The land only—the vacant as 
well as the used. Can’t you see that these 
other things are private property, services 
rendered by you to yourself, and are in no way 
related to the value of social service? What 
I do with that lot need not be related in the 
slightest to the value of that lot, to the oppor- 
tunity that I have possession of. 

So, we ought to charge people in taxes for 
what they get, not for what they possess, and 
not for any service that they render to them- 
selves. There is just one, and only one, sane, 
honest, businesslike and efficient way of rais- 
ing public revenue, and that is to take the 
value that the presence and the social activ- 
ities of the people create, to meet the expense 

16 


incurred by such social activities. In other 
words, every man, woman and child that 
comes into a town adds to the value of the land 
in that town, and every person that comes to it 
adds to the expense of the whole. Now, then, 
what is’ more sensible, more honest, more 
rational, than to take the value that they 
create to pay the expense that they incur? 

Now, this present stupid system of taxation 
we have leads to very bad results. It closes 
the door of opportunity, as I have said, to 
both labor and capital; and not only that, it 
creates a ruinous bill of expense to the com- 
munity itself. It spreads a town over a vast 
area, thus increasing the expense of the com- 
munity and bringing down the efficiency of 
social service to the lowest possible point. A 
small town spread over a great area—what 
can it do for its citizens? Mighty little, under 
the present system. The proper way would 
be to start with the land that is in use, be- 
ginning with a center, and working outward 
in a systematic, business-like way, thus get- 
ting the maximum of efficiency in social service 
for its citizens, whereas the system now in use 


gives the minimum. 


AN INDUSTRY TO ABOLISH / 


This vacant lot industry is a very bad in- 
dustry. There is nothing good about a vacant 
lot, except that it may be an opportunity to 
some man to get something for nothing. But 
let us keep this in mind, that when one man 
gets something for nothing, somebody else is 
getting nothing for something. That is the 
tragedy. When I gather where I did not sow, 
the poor fool that did the sowing will go home 
at even-tide with empty hands. You never 
knew a vacant lot to go into a store and buy 

17 


anything, did you?—buy any groceries, or any 
furniture or any clothing? You never knew a 
vacant lot to do anything except, perhaps, to 
act as a resting place for dead cats and empty 
cans and weeds and thistles, and slush in the 
winter time. 

Therefore, instead of encouraging the “va- 
cant lot industry, suppose we reverse things, 
and discourage the vacant lot industry. And 
what can we do that will discourage it? I am 
not finding fault with the man who speculates 
in land; he, like the rest of us, is the victim 
of the conditions of the system under which 
we live our social life. But under this system 
what happens? A man comes along with 
$100,000 capital that he wants to use. What is 
the result? Why, up goes the price of land, 
taking a larger part of his capital to pay for 
the opportunity to do business, and added to 
this the ever-increasing tax burden he has to 
bear. So he reasons with himself: “If I buy 
land and improve it, I have my doubts as to 
breaking even; but if I get some land and let 
it lie idle, the people of the community ‘will 
shortly make improvements, and in the course 
of a few years I will at least make five per cent 
annually on the value of the land—I am be- 
tween the devil and the deep blue sea. I will 
join the ranks of the idlers, because it is 
safer and more profitable to be an idler, under 
our present system.’’ You know we punish 
the workers and reward the idlers. It is hard 
to imagine it, when we consider how clever we 
are! 

Now, if we take land value for social use, 
are we robbing anybody? You know you can 
only steal a watch from a man that owns a 
watch—a man can only be robbed who has a 
property right in a thing. You have got to 

1 18 


‘ 


do one of two things: you have got to take 
for public uses income which individuals have 
earned or income which the community itself 
has earned. Which will you do? 

Will you take private property for social 
use, restrict trade and commerce, check in- 
dustries, and deny the poor man all oppor- 
tunity to employ himself on the land if he is 
not satisfied with the wages offered him? Or 
will you take public income for public use, and 
by that very act open the reservoir of land to 
the use of labor and capital? For the purpose 
of illustration I want to cite a couple of cases 
from my recent experience. 

In every town I go to, my first move is to 
charge down to the City Hall and get the 
facts of that town. A few nights ago I spoke 
in a place called R———————, New Jersey, 
and before speaking I got the following facts 
from the town records: The population was 
given as 6,729 and the area of the town 8,960 
acres. The expense budget for the year was 
$242,919; that makes for the population about 

36 per capita per year, which is nine-tenths 
as much as that of New York City. Of 
course they have a high tax rate, and besides 
that high asking prices for land. Also by rea- 
son of the large extent of the town they can- 
not give it all adequate public service, and 
on these accounts, and because of the way 
they lay their taxes the place is not growing as 
it should. As I have stated before, the area of 
the place is 8,960 acres. In that area there 
are, allowing for streets, about one hundred 
_ and seven thousand five hundred lots 25 x 100. 
Now, every lot is entitled to all the utilities 
that the town gives to anybody; but suppose 
you build on the outskirts a house costing five 
thousand dollars; they will tax you at least 

19 


one hundred dollars a year on that house (and 
at the end of fifty years they would have the 
house and you wouldn’t know it). Perhaps 
you will wake up some day and realize you are 
paying one hundred dollars a year in taxes on 
a house and are getting practically nothing 
in the way of public service. Then you go to 
the mayor and make a complaint that you 
haven't been getting any police protection, or 
any use of the various utilities, and he sits 
back in his chair and listens to you patiently 
and then he says that he will take the matter 
up and investigate and will see what can be 
done. Well, he can’t do anything for you, and 
he knows it. All town officials are in the same 
fix. 

At present the town of R is raising its 
revenue by taxing all kinds of individual 
property that they can reach—property for 
the most part which gets no benefit from 
public service. I pointed out in my talk that 
the thing that gets the benefit ought to pay 
the bill. The more money you spend in public 
utilities the higher your land values. At pres- 
ent your taxes fall very largely on labor value, — 
and are, therefore, a burden on family life. 
Now let us apply to this town a sane and 
business-like plan so simple that we ought to 
be able to teach it in the primary classes of 
our public schools. I said suppose you drop 
all other taxes and charge land values with an 
average of $3 a lot. With your one hundred 
and seven thousand five hundred lots you 
would then raise for your town not $242,000, 
but $322,000, or $80,000 more than you are 
getting now. That $3 would be the average 
tax between your top-notch lot held at 
$8,000 situated on the best corner and getting 
the cream of your social service, and your 

20 





- poorest and most distant lot worth $40. In 
other words, if they would levy a 5 per cent 
tax on the bare land in that town, the best 
lot would pay $400 and the poorest lot $2, 
whether improved or unimproved. 

Now, if I ran a hotel—which they say is the 
easiest business on earth to run, because all 
you have to do is to listen to the guests and 
they will tell you how to run it—if I ran a 
hotel that had two hundred rooms, furnished, 
lighted and heated, and I never had more than 
fifty guests, what would you say about me asa 
hotel man? You would justly say that I wasa 
fool to furnish and give service to one hundred 
and fifty vacant rooms. In that town of 
R , they could allow each of their thirteen 
hundred families ten lots of 25 x 100 ft. each, 
and then they would only occupy thirteen 
thousand lots, and would have vacant and 
idle ninety-four thousand lots. Mr. R 
is one mighty poor hotel man, is he not? Out 
there, they don’t like industry any more than 
we do in New York and so they fine industries; 
anybody that builds, or improves; anybody 
that does anything that is useful, they fine 
them in the aggregate, $148,000a year. That 
is the amount of the tax levied upon labor 
values. 

These vacant lots are only idle because it 
pays to hold them idle. Men wouldn’t leave 
capital in vacant land unless, in the run of 
years, the increase in selling value would 
amount to at least five per cent, which is the 
market rate for money, and so as an induce-_ 
ment to hold them idle, to stand in the way of 
progress, an inducement to do nothing, just 
simply nothing, they give out there every 
year about $300,000 in public value for private 
enjoyment. 








21 





Now let us step over to K ,NewYork. 
A town of about twenty-six thousand, which 
has been there since the Revolution. It occu- 
pies an acreage of 5,248 or 62,976 lots and has 
a budget of $483,000. An average tax of 
$8 a lot would give this city a revenue of 
$503,000, or $20,000 more than they get now 
by taxing land a little and industry a great 
deal. Under a 5 per cent tax on land price 
alone, the dearest lot in town would pay $300, 
and the cheapest $3, whether improved or 
unimproved, and certainly no home owner or 
owner of improved property would object 
to this form of taxation. 


RESULT OF WRONG TAXATION 


I interviewed a man that owned the 
costliest lot in town; he holds it at $6,000, 
and it has an old obsolete building on it. He 
now pays around $300 in taxation. After 
we had talked a while he said: “If they 
would let me put up a building here and 
not tax me for it, I would be perfectly 
willing to pay $500 a year on the land. I 
will put up the very best building in town, 
if they will just guarantee me freedom from 
tax on the building, but as long as they go 
on the present basis, I can do business in 
this shanty.’’ They could give three lots to 
every family in that town, and only utilize 
16,000 lots, and it would leave 46,000 vacant 
lots. The mayor sat at my right when I was 
talking to the Board of Trade in K , and 
when I sprung this he gasped, and said: 
“IT always knew that the darn old town 
was bigger than it ought to be.”’ The mayor 
looked at me and said: ‘“‘You do not mean to 
say that there is anybody in the town paying 
less than $8 a lot, do you?” I said: ‘“There 

22 





_is a bunch of property assessed as farm lands, 
and it is in the heart of this town, which is 
certainly not a farm site; it is assessed at 
a valuation of some $200 an acre.’”’ The 
owner of that land was paying taxes about 50 
cents a lot per annum, but if you wanted 
to buy it, you would have to pay a king’s 
ransom. 

Everywhere you go it is the same thing. 
You get two things out of this wretched sys- 
tem, and unnecessarily expanded town and a 
horrible bill of costs because of the unneces- 
sary extension of its area. 

The city of L , N. Y., has the same 
story—area 5,200 acres or 62,400 lots 25 x 100 
—budget $300,000. An average tax of $5 
a lot would yield $312,000, all other taxes 
abolished. Population about 20,000—4,000 
families of five—allow each family three lots 
for all purposes and they would have 50,000 
vacant lots—in town. They have a fine on 
industry of some $150,000 and a premium on 
idleness of about $300,000 per annum. 

Seven hundred miles of the costly streets of 
Manhattan and Brooklyn run past vacant 
lots, and every man, woman or child that 
passes and repasses a vacant lot contributes 
to the support of the owner through the in- 
crease in value. they cause just as surely as 
though they dropped their nickels or dimes 
into his hat at each passing. 

Ninety per cent of the cost of such functions 
as fire department and sanitary should be 
charged to old buildings, which are fire traps 
and pest holes—for modern buildings need 
very little fire service and no sanitary service. 

We have only one philosophy, and it is so 
simple—pay for what you get as indicated on 
the accurate thermometer of the rent value 

23 





of land—public value for public purposes, 
private property for private enjoyment. No 
honest man will object to that, if he can 
understand it. Of course if he can’t he is to 
be pitied; if he can understand it and objects 
to it, he is open to the charge, in the court of 
common sense, that the ground of his objec- 
tion is that he hopes or desires to get some of 
that public property for his private use. 


A PREDICTION 


There is no use trying to get the politicians 
and their rich and powerful backers to accept 
this great simple truth voluntarily. Their 
eyes and ears are tight shut by the enormous 
profits derived from things as they are, and 
cries of anarchy! confiscation! and vested in- 
terests! meets every attempt to lessen their 
profits from a system which combines in- 
justice with oppression, puts the brakes on 
industry and permits not even an approach to 
equality of opportunity. The only remedy 
is patient, simple pointing-out the facts to 
the voters. When enough of them have 
“caught on,” the politicians, ever alert to the 
signs of the time, will jump away from their 
present backers without so much as a good- 
bye and will align themselves with the people, 
protesting that they have been loyal single 
taxers ever since the world began. 


24 





FIVE PAMPHLETS 


A PLAIN TALK ON TAXATION 


| THE FARMER AND THE SINGLE 
TAX 


OPEN LETTER TO LEGISLATORS 
by James R. Brown - 


| NOT A SINGLE TAX by Chas.T. Root 
A SERMON by William F. Baxter 


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